Nick Taylorhttp://www.nick-taylor.co.uk
Mon, 27 Jul 2015 10:30:47 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Four Makerspaces and a Shedhttp://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/06/four-makerspaces-and-a-shed/
http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/06/four-makerspaces-and-a-shed/#commentsWed, 10 Jun 2015 11:39:28 +0000http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/?p=1857Continue reading →]]>Over the past three months, I’ve been doing site visits to maker and hacker spaces across Scotland. For the first phase of In the Making, we’re surveying existing facilities in the UK to identify what opportunities and challenges they might present to disabled users.

Two Types of Space

It quickly became clear that makerspaces fell into two categories. There are large and (reasonably) well-resourced commercial spaces that act as service providers, aiming to make digital fabrication tools available to a wide range of people. Then there are smaller, less well-resourced community spaces started by groups of enthusiasts who primarily want a space to meet like-minded makers. But there’s also a gradient between the two categories, and it’s clear that some of the smaller spaces have the ambitions to grow and reach a wider audience.

What we haven’t found is many examples of makerspaces being used by disabled people, which was perhaps to be expected. There are some examples of DIY assistive technologies being built, most notably in the form of 3D printed prosthetics, but we’re interested in what usage might exist beyond assistive technologies. What we did find is a lot of examples of spaces large and small reaching out to wider audiences, including people with disabilities, through public events, mobile facilities and partnerships with various organisations. But resourcing these outreach activities was a struggle, especially for the smaller spaces.

I was particularly drawn to the therapeutic aspects of craft and making. This was evident in collaborations between makerspaces, arts organisations and disabilities charities, where the act of making is found to be much more important than what is made. But it was also evident in the community spirit of the smaller makerspaces, where the value of having the space and collocating otherwise solitary activities far outstripped the value of the activities themselves. Happily, my final visit underlined this spectacularly.

Westhill Men’s Shed

Westhill Men’s Shed is part of an international network of sheds where men, mostly retired, come to work on projects in the workshop, but they also come to chat, play cards, drink tea, take cookery lessons and use ICT facilities. Underpinning all of this is a focus on mental health and emotional wellbeing—although this is not foregrounded due to the stigmas attached, particularly in the eyes of older men.

When I visited on a Friday lunchtime, the Shed was far busier than any makerspace I visited with somewhere between 12 and 20 members present. The wellbeing outcomes that they have seen are astounding. An analysis by the Scottish Men’s Shed Association has shown a tenfold return on investment, as members are happier and healthier, requiring and finding themselves requiring less medication. Individual stories are no less remarkable—men who have retired or lost their wives, given a lifeline and a new sense of purpose. Just as impressively, the Shed has become self-sufficient by selling the things they make and upcycling donated tools.

Beyond the amazing qualities of the Men’s Shed, what struck me most was the similarity to many of the makerspaces that I’d visited, particularly the smaller ones. The tools—and the attendees—might be a bit more old-school, but in both cases, the existence of the workshop itself was incidental—what was important was that it brought people together. I thought it was interesting that by targeting a particular community with shared experiences and issues, rather than a particular set of fabrication technologies, Men’s Sheds had been able to propagate across Scotland much faster than makerspaces. I think makerspaces could probably learn a lot from what they’ve achieved.

For the past year or so I’ve been working with Aidan Moseby, Clive Gilman from DCA and my colleague Jon Rogers on a small project for New Media Scotland Alt-w fund. We were one of a number of projects comissioned to complement Ginsberg, a newly-launched app designed to improve health and wellbeing through mood-tracking and self-reflection.

A few weeks ago we officially launched Sagacity at Edinburgh Science Festival’s LateLab, alongside Ginsberg itself and a number of other Alt-w projects. Where Ginsberg prompts reflection on the self, Sagacity is a visualisation designed to prompt reflection on the city. Cities generate a lot of existing content that we can use: social media, news, traffic, weather, so Sagacity aims to scape existing data generated by and about Dundee and reflect this back in an engaging way.

Visualising the City

A lot of the ideas we threw around for visualising the city used existing systems of categorisations as metaphors—colours and weather, for example, both of which have an existing association with mood. Ultimately Aidan settled on a Periodic Table of Emotions—we were developing this round about the time that Breaking Bad ended, so the symbols had a kind of currency that they had previously only enjoyed at chemistry conventions.

He devised a table where similar emotions are grouped and ordered by intensity, much like the table of elements (see below). For example, the left-hand column collections various forms of happiness (genial, pleased, happy, joyful, delighted, elated and ecstatic), while the second collects forms of loneliness (separate, remote, lonely, alienated, isolated, abandoned).

Next, we need to automatically grab instances of these words being generated in Dundee. This turns out to be harder than you might expect.

Bringing Sagacity to Life

After exploring a number of data sources, we turned to Twitter as the most appropriate option: where else do people broadcast their emotions to the world? But while Twitter has a geo-tagging feature, nobody turns it on. Searching for the term ‘Dundee’ is no good either: in the couple of weeks I was testing that approach, speculation about Manchester United buying a Dundee player, news that One Direction were delivering toys to Ninewells Hospital and a re-run of Crocodile Dundee 2 all overwhelmed the data. In the end, we scraped tweets from a pre-defined panel of known Dundee tweeters, but also allowed people to add themselves to the panel by tweeting on the #dundeefeels hashtag. This is obviously not very scientific, but our hope is that the panel will grow larger and more representative over time.

Next, we need to turn our content into emotions. After exploring a number of sentiment analysis tools, it was clear that even categorising tweets into positive and negative was not really achievable. Instead, we looked for instances of the words in the table: when a word is used, the box lights up, and then fades out slowly over time. The effect is a constantly shifting pattern of colours and intensities. I had hoped that it might be a bit more dynamic, but this will improve as the panel (and consequently the dataset) grows. Playing back at high speed is also pretty captivating!

Coming Next

The plan was always to exhibit Sagacity over a longer period, supporting the kind of reflection we had intended to provoke. We will hopefully be exhibiting Sagacity in Dundee soon, as well as at a number of one-off events where the visualisation can reflect the mood of event attendees rather than the entire city.

Update: Since I wrote this I learned that you can pull tweets from a geographic area that aren’t geotagged, as Twitter uses profile data to make a best guess, but the API has been broken since November. Hoping to play around with this in the future.

]]>http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/unveiling-sagacity-at-edinburgh-science-festival/feed/0TICTeC 2015: Revisiting the Myth of Digital Democracyhttp://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/tictec-2015-revisiting-the-myth-of-digital-democracy/
http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/tictec-2015-revisiting-the-myth-of-digital-democracy/#commentsThu, 16 Apr 2015 13:00:13 +0000http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/?p=1759Continue reading →]]>I recently read Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy [1], in which he tears down the notion that the Internet has significantly democratised participation in the political sphere. I particularly enjoyed his data driven, economics approach to the issue, which reminded me of the methods used in Freakonomics [2]and my very favourite example of counter-intuitive cause and effect, in which postal voting actually decreased turnout at Swiss referendums [3].

Hindman’s core argument was that structure of the web itself prevents it from truly democratising participation—the way Google works, for example, bestows a rich-get-richer effect on content that is already widely linked. Interestingly, though, his work was based on a pre-social media Internet and he was largely talking about blogs as a mechanism for political discourse. I was left wondering what effect social media—which has undoubtedly changed some of the structure of the web—might have on his findings. Sharing and retweeting, for example, are recent structural elements that provide new opportunities for discovery (but certainly don’t even things out!)

With a focus on the impact of civic technology, and on web-based civic technologies in particular, it was natural that these issues would crop up at TICTeC. Shelley Boulianne’s opening keynote addressed it head-on with a meta-analysis [4] of research examining whether Internet use has a positive or negative effect on civic engagement. You don’t come across a lot of meta-analyses in design-led HCI research, so this was a nice change! Her analysis of 38 studies showed an overall positive effect. What’s interesting in this case is that it’s not the Internet acting as a tool for participation, but rather to better inform citizens and inspire them to participate through more traditional means.

Ethan Zuckerman’s closing keynote likewise did a great job of dismantling some assumptions around slacktivism—low-effort online activities like putting a Twibbon on your profile picture, which are widely regarded as being ineffectual. He argued that these simple but visible actions can actually go a long way towards challenging and ultimately changing social norms. For example, if a large number of your friends and family are visibly supporting gay marriage, this has a lot of normative influence. In this example, it is not just social media’s ability to get a large number of people involved that makes it effective, but also its ability to draw on influential social ties.

I think these examples go a long way to illustrating the wide variety of ways in which technology can have an impact, but also that sometimes need to go digging a little deeper to find them.

]]>http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/tictec-2015-revisiting-the-myth-of-digital-democracy/feed/0TICTeC 2015: Take-Home Thoughts on Civic Techhttp://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/tictec-2015-take-home-thoughts-on-civic-tech/
http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/tictec-2015-take-home-thoughts-on-civic-tech/#commentsMon, 13 Apr 2015 09:30:13 +0000http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/?p=1770Continue reading →]]>At the end of March I attended the first TICTeC conference, run by mySociety in London. If you haven’t come across mySociety yet, you will almost certainly have come across one of their websites, including TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and YourNextMP. They now have a research programme aimed at understanding how effective these tools are, part of which includes running an annual conference bringing together people interested in civic tech.

I turned up to give a presentation about Viewpoint and I don’t think I’ve ever been to an event that seemed quite so tailored to my interests—in fact, I think I’ve run events I was less interested in. There was a lot to soak up, but now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to digest, here are some take-home thoughts.

How do we measure the impact of civic technologies?

Opening the conference, mySociety CEO Tom Steinberg set out the importance of this question with a neat analogy: in the past, doctors prescribed all sorts of things that we now know to be hokum, because they lacked the ability (or will) to rigorously test their remedies. If we develop civic technologies but don’t rigorously test their impacts, we are effectively doing the same thing.

When talking about Viewpoint I’m always candid about the fact that while we succeeded in our goal of generating high levels of participation, with hard data to prove it, we failed to find a way of converting that participation in to meaningful outcomes. What’s more, we didn’t really have a clear idea of how to evaluate that. It was both reassuring and concerning to discover that most other people working with civic tech didn’t really have a clear idea of that yet either.

By coincidence, this question has emerged on three separate projects I’m involved in over the subsequent couple of weeks. One of the solutions mooted has been measures of self-efficacy or collective efficacy that measure people’s belief in their ability to effect a change before and after the intervention. This sounds quite neat and tidy, but I’ve never quite been convinced by the simple ten-point checklists that have been developed for this purpose. Slightly more convincing are community-level indicators, which measure conditions in the community tailored to your goals. However, both these approaches are confounded by the time-scales we work with: research projects are increasingly tending towards the 18-month variety, but these effects can take a long time to emerge.

What is the value proposition to civic organisations of getting involved with researchers?

In contrast to most conferences I attend, practitioners vastly outnumbered academics and it was interesting to see how the non-academic civic tech community perceives us. The two communities have a lot to offer each other, but articulating the academic contribution and working around practical challenges is difficult. It’s something I spent a lot of time banging by head against while working on the Creative Exchange (with only a headache to show for it). Not least amongst the practical difficulties is the seemingly glacial pace that academia works at. Even our shortest projects don’t mesh well with small organisations who need to be fleet of foot.

There’s also the issue of money: we have a bad reputation for assuming organisations will be willing to take part in research projects for free. It’s not entirely our fault, as RCUK is often the most attractive source of funding for us, but typically won’t hand anything out to non-academic partners. There is some sign of change on this front: In the Making is funded through a strand of AHRC funding that allowed groups representing communities (in our case Disability Rights UK) to be funded as Community Co-Investigators, and the AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hubs are also handing out limited amounts of funding to non-academic organisations. I’d love to see EPSRC’s Research in the Wild strand move in this direction, where it seems particularly appropriate.

How do we think beyond the web?

My last thought is more of a self-centered observation. The vast majority of work I saw presented was web-based and much of it was based on national-level discourse. There were exceptions: Nanjira Sambuli spoke about the importance of local radio and it was great to meet some people from Code for America and their international siblings whose work can potentially take all kinds of forms. But for the most part of idea of civic technology is currently grounded in the web.

The web is obviously pretty great and a powerful tool for civic engagement—you only have to look at the level of discourse going on right now around the General Election to see that. But if we fixate on the web, we risk being blinkered in the same way that Old Media was. Civic life works at a lot of different scales and the web isn’t suitable for all of them—at least, not the web as we currently conceive it. I went along hoping to show that we can think much more creatively about the role that technology can play: I don’t know how effective I was in doing that, but I think it’s something that bears repeating.

]]>http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/tictec-2015-take-home-thoughts-on-civic-tech/feed/0Research Bloghttp://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/research-blog/
http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/2015/04/research-blog/#commentsTue, 07 Apr 2015 14:53:04 +0000http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/?p=1742Continue reading →]]>It’s been a while since I had a blog. I think I first tried when I was about to go to university, but it’s fair to say that nothing of value was ever written there. I gave it another stab when I registered this domain and became briefly obsessed with Google products and RSS feeds. For the longest time, the main driver of traffic towards my site was an essay about why I thought this new thing called Facebook was kinda neat.

This week I was catching up with a friend who asked if there was anything she could read about what I’m up to at the moment (no really), and the short answer was “no”. A while back I put a bit of effort into writing up summary pages for various projects I’ve been involved in, but I think a lot of the most exciting stuff falls into the gap somewhere between a project being defined and a paper being published.

So I’m going to post here infrequently about project progress, events and other research activities that get lost amongst all the grumbling and whimsy on Twitter — if nothing else, it’s nice to crack out the first person pronouns for a change.